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MIT Engineers Break Barriers in Light-Controlling Nanotechnology

MIT researchers have developed a groundbreaking platform in nanophotonics that achieves what has long been considered an elusive combination: ultracompact optical devices that are both highly efficient and dynamically tunable. The innovation, detailed in the July 8 issue of Nature Photonics, represents a significant advancement in the manipulation of light at the nanoscale—billionths of a meter.

“This work marks a significant step toward a future in which nanophotonic devices are not only compact and efficient, but also reprogrammable and adaptive, capable of dynamically responding to external inputs,” explained Riccardo Comin, MIT’s Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics and leader of the research.

The team, which included co-first authors Ahmet Kemal Demir and Luca Nessi, along with Sachin Vaidya, Connor A. Occhialini, and Marin Soljačić, focused on overcoming long-standing limitations in traditional nanophotonic materials.

Conventional nanophotonics has relied primarily on materials like silicon, silicon nitride, and titanium dioxide to create structures that guide and control light. While effective, these materials suffer from two critical constraints: modest refractive indices that limit how tightly light can be confined, and fixed optical behavior once fabricated, making them difficult to reconfigure without physical alteration.

“Tunability is essential for many next-gen photonics applications, enabling adaptive imaging, precision sensing, reconfigurable light sources, and trainable optical neural networks,” noted Vaidya, a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

The MIT team’s solution centers on chromium sulfide bromide (CrSBr), a layered quantum material with a rare combination of magnetic order and strong optical response. CrSBr’s exceptional properties stem from excitons—quasiparticles formed when a material absorbs light, creating electron-hole pairs that strongly interact with light.

These excitons give CrSBr an extraordinarily large refractive index, allowing researchers to create photonic structures up to ten times thinner than those made from traditional materials. “We can make optical structures as thin as 6 nanometers, or just seven layers of atoms stacked on top of each other,” Demir explained.

The material’s most revolutionary aspect is its tunability. By applying a modest magnetic field, the researchers demonstrated the ability to continuously and reversibly switch the optical mode—essentially changing how light flows through the nanostructure without any moving parts or temperature changes.

“This degree of control is enabled by a giant, magnetically induced shift in the refractive index, far beyond what is typically achievable in established photonic materials,” Demir said.

The interaction between light and excitons in CrSBr is so strong that it creates polaritons—hybrid light-matter particles that enable new forms of photonic behavior, including enhanced nonlinearities and novel quantum light transport mechanisms. Unlike conventional systems that require external optical cavities to achieve this effect, CrSBr supports polaritons inherently.

The material’s compatibility with existing photonic platforms makes it immediately relevant to real-world applications. CrSBr can serve as a tunable component in otherwise passive devices, potentially revolutionizing integrated photonic circuits.

Currently, the demonstrated effects occur at very cold temperatures up to 132 kelvins (-222 degrees Fahrenheit). While below room temperature, this limitation doesn’t diminish the material’s potential for specialized applications such as quantum simulation, nonlinear optics, and reconfigurable polaritonic platforms, where its exceptional tunability justifies operation in cryogenic environments.

“CrSBr is so unique with respect to other common materials that even going down to cryogenic temperatures will be worth the trouble, hopefully,” Demir added. The team is also exploring related materials with higher magnetic ordering temperatures to enable similar functionality under more accessible conditions.

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and a MathWorks Science Fellowship, with work performed partly at MIT.nano.

The breakthrough represents a significant advancement in the field of nanophotonics, potentially opening new avenues for optical computing, telecommunications, and quantum information processing where dynamic control of light at the nanoscale is essential.

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28 Comments

  1. Interesting update on Ultrasmall Optical Devices Challenge Traditional Light Manipulation Principles. Curious how the grades will trend next quarter.

  2. Elizabeth Martin on

    Interesting update on Ultrasmall Optical Devices Challenge Traditional Light Manipulation Principles. Curious how the grades will trend next quarter.

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